In VMware vRealize Automation 7 (vRA), blueprints are converged, rather than the single vs. multi machine blueprints that we were used to in vRA6. This presents an interesting challenge when requesting new catalog items from vRO.

In vRA6, if you wanted to request a new catalog item from vRO, you would run the “Request catalog item” workflow and simply pass any property values along with your request and those property values would be applied to the resulting item in vRA. For instance, when requesting a new VM with 2 vCPUs specified as part of the request, you could specify the following custom property in as part of the request from vRA6:

provider-VirtualMachine.CPU.Count = 2;

In vRA7, you could still use the “Request a catalog item” workflow, however you’ll find that the “provider-<propertyName>“ properties passed with the request are not honoured and will have no effect on the resulting virtual machine. The reason this is happening is because of the converged blueprint. You now need to specify the VM for which the property value is mean to be set. It’s no longer assumed that you only have one virtual machine as part of your blueprint.